The Last Guardian has a release date, and it’s getting closer. Close enough to generate that little tingle of anticipation, and for the hype wave to crest. I spoke about hype for No Man’s Sky already, but this one is closer to home for me.

Excitement

I am very excited for the release of The Last Guardian. I’ve been waiting for it for years, the entire life span of the PS3 actually, but I’m not going to let that get to me. I’m pumped because Team ICO have given us such great works in the past. Ico was a good game with a lot of heart, and Shadow of the Colossus is a master work. These games are so well regarded because they are tapping into the true potential that video games have as a story telling medium. If we can say that Shadow of the Colossus has taken lessons from Ico and become an all time great, what is the potential for The Last Guardian?

This game has the pedigree, and the vision. Fumito Ueda is going to take us on an emotional journey that will be complex and rewarding. It will dark and sweet without being bittersweet. It will be grandiose without losing intimacy. It will take us as players into a new realm and inspire us to feel. If the past work is any indication, The Last Guardian will be all this, and more. As Penny-Arcade put it:

Being in development for over eight years, there has been a lot of time to work on one of the core features of the game, the AI of the baby gryphon companion. I expect that it will be able to operate with enough autonomy to forge with each player a legitimate emotional bond. I expect to have a moment even more powerful than in Shadow of the Colossus when…

We’ve had 8 years to build up our expectations, and all that time should add up to a better experience, right?

Concerns

First of all, we all know that more time doesn’t equate to a better product. *COUGH*Duke Nukem Forever*COUGH* Often, longer development times mean that something in the production was troubled. In the video game world, where technology shifts under your feet so fast, it also means that the original architecture of the game may no longer apply. This is a game that began before the PS3 was released. It’s not even a transitional title from the PS3 to the PS4, it’s almost a relic of a bygone era. The team hasn’t released anything in the mean time, and the conventions of video games have shifted since then. Are we going to get a PS2 game released as a PS4 game, with outdated visuals, awkwardly tuned controls, and an uncooperative camera?

The long development also implies there have been deep issues in the underlying features of the game. The autonomous gryphon is an ambitious game element. It is a concept that has tripped up developers before. If they can’t get these features to perform properly, or come together, then the entire experience will suffer.

Team ICO itself isn’t necessarily what it was when development began, either. Fumito Ueda officially left Sony in 2011, even while agreeing to finish The Last Guardian. It’s difficult to know exactly what impact this has on the project, but any separation speaks to some unhappiness on some level which could lead to morale issues with the team. If that’s the case, then it’s not difficult to imagine this affecting the quality of the work.

Balancing Expectations

Alright, time to mount up…

…on my high horse

Yeah, I’m excited for the game, but I’m going into this with my eyes open. The potential is huge, but potential isn’t what we’re going to get. We are going to get a product. This product looks to be ambitious, and with that ambition that contributes to the potential. This product also has lineage that adds to that potential. The potential makes us hope that it will impress us, to live up to that potential. The problem is when that hope becomes expectation. I hope that The Last Guardian will give me experiences like Shadow of the Colossus did, but to expect that is unfair. What I do expect is for the game to be ambitious, and to attempt to have an emotional through line that powerfully resonates with the player. The attempt is what I expect, not the success of that attempt.

The game may fulfill its potential. The game may overtake Shadow of the Colossus for how revered it is by players.  The game may again tap into that true potential that video games have to tell a story, and become a go-to for extolling the virtues of video games as art. On the other hand, the game may wind up a convoluted mess that suffers immensely for its tortured development cycle. Right now, even with early looks at the game expressing concerns, either of these outcomes, or anything in between, is possible.

In the end, what I am hyped for with The Last Guardian is ambition; ambition for emotional storytelling, and ambition for The only way that The Last Guardian will truly disappoint me is if the final product does not show any ambition.

Save us from paint by numbers!

Kynetyk is a veteran of the games industry. Behind the Line is written to help improve understanding of what goes on in the game development process and the business behind it. From “What’s taking this game so long to release”, to “why are there bugs”, to “Why is this free to play” or anything else, if there is a topic that you would like to see covered, please write in to kynetyk@enthusiacs.com